Middle Eastern Realities

The Bizarre World of Radical Climate Science

Imagine that you are a climate scientist and the Earth
is threatened with a climate disaster. You need to warn the people of Earth and
lobby Earth’s governments. If you are tired of poring over boring computer
printouts, you may be only too ready to accept this mission of transcendent
importance.

On the other hand, maybe you have lost touch with
reality. Maybe you have become a true believer fighting a dubious battle.
Maybe you are Dr. James Hansen, high civil servant, recipient of cash awards
from left-wing foundations, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. Hansen was arrested in front of the White House, dressed up to look
like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 1950s scientific martyr. Hansen wants CEOs of
energy companies to be prosecuted for
“crimes against humanity.”

When scientists are fanatical believers in a cause,
the authority and credibility that attach to science are turned into political
capital to be spent in pursuit of that cause.

The late Stephen Schneider, Stanford climate
scientist, explained how this works:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up
some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of
any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between
being effective, and being honest.

Global warming catastrophism is convenient for climate
science. It is simplistic to claim that climate scientists are making up the
global warming scare in order to promote research funding. But global warming
catastrophism clearly does promote research funding. So there is a convenient
congruence between catastrophism and the bureaucratic ambitions of
research establishments.

Climate science deals with the energy balance of the
Earth and the behavior of the atmosphere. This is a very complicated system
involving convection, evaporation, precipitation, clouds, ocean heat storage,
reflection, and emission of radiation, and more. Although scientific
understanding of the system has advanced, especially with the advent of
computers and satellites, the system is still quite mysterious in important
respects. It’s not at all clear that climate science will ever advance to a
point where long-range predictions can be trusted, or, as they say, demonstrate
skill.

Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the
atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it. As a result,
CO2 has been slowly increasing. Increasing the proportion of
CO2 in the atmosphere will probably exert a warming influence because
CO2 has an inhibiting effect on the outgoing infrared (heat)
radiation that cools the Earth. Nearly everyone, skeptic or believer, agrees
with these basic facts. Another basic fact that the purveyors of global warming
like to keep quiet about is that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes
plants grow much
better with less water. That’s because plants in general
struggle to extract the scant CO2 in the air.

What is controversial is how much warming can be
expected and whether the warming will create practical problems. The evidence
supporting substantial warming (i.e., 3 degrees C) is output from bad computer
models. It’s said that dogs come to resemble their masters. Computer models
tend to reflect the aspirations of their creators.

The global warming promoters try to hang all kinds of
supplementary disasters on
their proposed 3-degree warming over a century. This is even more dubious than
the warming itself. Some of their claims are absurd, such as the suggestion
that the oceans are going to rise substantially, a claim for which there is zero
credible evidence.
The data has been running against the theories of global warming. The
atmosphere has failed to warm
since 1998, and, more importantly, the upper ocean has failed to warm
since 2003.

The idea that we are on the verge of a climate
disaster caused by modern civilization is a romantic idea that appeals to people
who have lost traditional religion. It’s another iteration of the
environmentalist dogma that civilization is ruining the earth. It’s a Garden of
Eden story. Anyone can see that the landscape of areas where industry and
technology dominate nature, like Germany or New Jersey, is in far better
condition than the landscape is in most third-world countries — countries that
lack evil industry and that practice the precious local small-scale agriculture
so loved by the ideologues who want remake the economy to prevent global
warming. The idea that the Earth would be a paradise without civilization is
contradicted by the wild climate swings that we know have taken place in recent
geological time. Ice sheets a mile thick retreated from much of North America
10,000 years ago.

The reports of the International Panel on Climate
Change (the IPCC) are often taken as the authoritative last word on climate
change. These reports are are disorganized and unfocused. As a result, most
people go no further than the introductory Summary for Policy Makers. If you
dig deep into the reports, solid scientific support for the claims of impending
catastrophe is not there. Computer models are the shaky foundation of global
warming. Models from different modeling groups disagree with each other by wide
margins. As the IPCC admits, the models have serious deficiencies. The IPCC
uses misleading graphical illustrations to
make it appear that the models can accurately mimic the Earth’s
climate.

The CO2 reduction proposals of the global
warming gang are relentlessly ideological and impractical. CO2-free
nuclear power supplies 80% of France’s electricity and 20% of the electricity in
the U.S. Nuclear fuel is very cheap, and vast supplies are available. The real
problem with nuclear is that environmentalist groups have run a hysterical
anti-nuclear campaign for the last 50 years. A reversal now would be a severe
blow to their credibility. So, instead of nuclear, the global warming gang
proposes that we use solar power and wind power, technologies that can cost 10
times more
per kilowatt-hour.
They don’t seem to understand that solar doesn’t work when a cloud blocks the
sun or at night, and wind doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing. As a
consequence, solar and wind need to be backed up by fossil fuel or hydro plants
with spinning generators ready to quickly assume the load of the grid. People
who are ignorant concerning engineering or science may accept the notion that
wind and solar are realistic sources of electricity. It is more difficult to
explain why the government is dumping billions of dollars
into these technologies, both in the form of cash and in the form of mandates
that shift the cost to electricity users.

Many scientists may have a predilection for green
fashion — for example, backyard compost heaps, organic food, bicycles, solar
panels, or giant wind turbines. Nobody cares. But it is wrong to misuse the
authority and credibility of science to scare the rest of us into embracing the
green lifestyle.

Al Gore Might Be Getting Weirder, But the Weather Isn’t

By Doug Powers • February 12, 2011 12:49 PM

**Written by Doug Powers

Al Gore blamed the nasty late-January/early February winter weather on global warming, in spite of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Environmental Protection Agency predicting warmer winters with less snow.

With an additional inconvenient truth for the Goracle, Anne Jolis writes in the Wall Street Journal about the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project. The project is analyzing atmospheric circulation from 1871 to present to determine if blizzards, cyclones, heat waves and deep-freezes are are worsening. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case:

As it happens, the project’s initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years,” atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.”

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. “There’s no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather,” adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.

And this whole time I thought Al Gore was a fool to spend millions of dollars on an seaside mansion after predicting the oceans would rise and alter the world’s coastlines, but it turns out he must have known all along that he was just blowing hot air.

Re-packaging and re-selling global warming to an increasingly skeptical America may be one of the first assignments of Gore’s new Chief News Officer, and they’ll have to do it one viewer at a time — almost literally.

Leftist media in full court press backing warmism

Russell Cook

If a major news story casts doubt on man-caused global warming, does it make a sound? If you are a promoter of the global warming crisis, those stories misdirect public opinion and prevent everyone from solving the crisis, while the rest of us see them as specks of gold in raging torrents of stories affirming Al Gore’s settled science.

Consider the ClimateGate story and its recent one-year anniversary. According to the Media Research Center,

Even though many considered it a huge scandal, the three broadcast networks didn’t think so. They ignored the story for roughly two weeks, and have only mentioned it in a dozen stories in the past year.

My own favorite mainstream media punching bag, PBS’ NewsHour did at least give the story cursory mention ten days after it broke, but then couldn’t be troubled to offer in-depth discussion of it until four months later, its solitary effort of lengthy analysis on the topic. This was noteworthy if only because it featured skeptic scientist Pat Michaels, the first such skeptic to appear on the NewsHour offering any opposing viewpoint of significance since George Taylor in 2007. That 2007 program was the NewsHour‘s first major foray into global warming skeptic opinion since the interview of an industry executive in 1997, and was one of just a few bits that prevented the NewsHour from having a 100% bias against presenting such viewpoints, as I quantified in a prior American Thinker article.

Yet, Joe Romm had this to say about ClimateGate’s anniversary in his 11/15 ClimateProgress blog titled “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” (hat tip to Michael Wiant),

The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink…focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science…the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media…devoted a large fraction of its climate ‘ink’ in the last 12 months to what was essentially a non-story…

Romm’s efforts to frame the media as not doing its job properly are nothing new, Ross Gelbspan had this to say in his 2004 Boiling Point book about the media,

For many years, the press accorded the same weight to the “skeptics” as it did to mainstream scientists. This was done in the name of journalistic balance. In fact, it was journalistic laziness.

And for good measure, he said this about snowstorms in his 1997 The Heat is On, when speaking about a series of weather patterns being proof of global warming,

The severe weather has continued into 1996. My own back yard became a snow-buried casualty of New England’s 1995-96 winter from hell.

It’s a no-win exercise: excess snow is proof of global warming… unless someone in the mainstream breaks ranks and seriously asks if the prior “warming” from a few years ago couldn’t be proof for the original 1970s global cooling crisis.

Everyone knows how fickle the mainstream media is, and how they are ultimately driven to out-scoop each other for ratings gains. If they smell blood in the water of an imminent collapse to this entire so-called crisis, they will turn on each other and promoters like Romm and Gelbspan in a heartbeat, no doubt with yells of being hoodwinked or assumptions that other news outlets had initially checked the voracity of the “warming” science everyone else relies on.

Global warming brainwashing

Carol
Headrick

It’s freezing. Our kids have been lied to their entire
lives.

Step outside and ask yourself if billions of your tax dollars were well
spent on Global Warming. What if the amount is in the trillions? Generations
of American children have grown up being taught the dangers of man-made global
warming. On just one day, my twelve year old son heard about global warming in
his science class, his Planet Earth video in English class, and in the Green
Ideas in his school newspaper. It comes close to being brain-washed. Many
teachers are also brain-washed. They too have been taught that the science
behind global warming is settled. Our teachers need to be introduced to
Climategate. Simple words will spell it out. The data was manipulated and made
up, facts omitted, disagreements silenced. Pass this on to our children. They
have been lied to their whole lives and deserve better.

The great Global Warming Scientists were and are still well-funded and
continue this farce. The latest name is Global Climate Disruption. We have
been lied to and continue to be lied to. We should not only be mad but demand
that anyone participating in this fraud be prosecuted. Any funding should
immediately be ceased. Thinking Americans should research Global Warming for
themselves. The worst part is finding out why. But most of all, I want our
children to grow up to be thinkers.

Is it getting hot in here, or is Nancy Pelosi crazy? House Republicans will most likely bet on the latter:

Republicans will eliminate the House committee created by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to highlight the threat of climate change, Representative James Sensenbrenner, the top Republican on the panel, said today.

In one of her first acts as speaker in 2007, Pelosi, a California Democrat, created the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to draw attention to climate-change science and showcase how a cap on carbon dioxide needn’t be a threat to economic growth.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said it’s “very disappointing” that House Republicans will shut the committee and won’t make energy independence and climate change a priority in the next Congress.

President Obama’s attempt to turn the Deepwater Horizon disaster into an advertisement for alternative “green” energies and “cap and trade” legislation was so offensive that even Senator Diane Feinstein was forced to observe[1] that “the climate bill isn’t going to stop the oil leak.”

In a June 15 column[2] published by the New York Times, Peter Baker took that analysis a bit further:

“The connection to the spill, of course, goes only so far. While (Obama) called for more wind turbines and solar panels, for instance, neither fills gasoline tanks in cars and trucks, and so their expansion would not particularly reduce the need for the sort of deepwater drilling that resulted in the spill.”

This entirely reasonable and technically accurate statement enflamed the president’s cheerleaders over at Media Matters, where Fae Jencks[3] took Baker to task:

“While wind and solar energy may not fill cars’ tanks, it will power their batteries. What Baker fails to acknowledge is that by ensuring that ‘more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power,’ Obama would ensure that those vehicles are powered with clean energy rather than with electricity produced by fossil fuel plants.”

Those two sentences summarize the green nirvana that the president is trying to foist upon America. It’s a goal that’s entirely unachievable, because of a number of technical and economic realties that lie just below the surface of simplistic analysis. It’s not surprising that a technically-illiterate blogger who posts at a site devoted to echoing this administration’s progressive agenda would make such an assertion, but it’s quite disturbing that the man who is supposed to be the leader of the free world would utter such foolishness.

Both wind power[4] and solar power[5] are more expensive – incredibly so in the case of solar – than either fossil power or nuclear power. Worse, you can’t count on either wind or solar as a reliable source of energy, since the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Accordingly, for each megawatt of wind and solar capacity we develop, another megawatt of back-up power, typically powered by fossil fuels, has to be in place. This redundancy adds to the already unacceptable cost of “green energy.”

Even if we ignore the economic aspects and accept the progressive proposition that the government has an infinite supply of money available to spend, the idea that the wind and sun can power our cars makes no sense. The reason that our vehicles use gasoline is that gas is a very efficient means to store energy. A gallon of gasoline, which weighs a little over six pounds, contains far more useful energy than the six pounds of the best batteries on the market. So, before you factor anything else in, gasoline’s weight to power ratio makes it the better choice in terms of energy efficiency. Will batteries improve over time? Sure they will, although modern, high-capacity batteries typically involve using materials that come with their own environmental hazards. Still, no battery that exists or that is being contemplated comes close to matching the energy storage capacity of gasoline.

Next, there are the unavoidable inefficiencies of the electric transmission system itself. America’s power grid is a wonder of modern technology and it’s obviously necessary to distribute the power we need to run our refrigerators and computers, light our homes and keep the pumps and motors that industry depends on turning. Yet, electric power distribution is hardly the model of efficiency. A significant portion of the energy generated by power plants is lost in distribution[6], due to voltage drops, resistant heating and other line losses. In many cases, moving energy around the nation via a network of thousands of miles of metal cables represents the best way to transmit power, but it’s hardly the most efficient way to do it.

Consider motor vehicles. By the time we work our way through all of the inherent, expensive and unavoidable inefficiencies of generating, transporting and storing so-called green power in the vain effort to fuel our transportation needs, we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that doing so would create more of a demand for power, not less. Or, to put the president’s proposition another way, if America somehow transformed itself into a nation in which the transportation sector was fueled entirely by electricity, we would be significantly less energy efficient than we are today. We can, and should, continue to develop hybrids, for that technology provides even more bang for our fossil fuel buck, without pretending that the ultimate source of power – crude oil – isn’t our best energy option.

Ultimately, if we can figure out a way to use as-of-yet undiscovered solar-powered catalysts to produce hydrogen inexpensively, we may free ourselves from the tyranny of fossil fuels altogether. Yet, as technology proceeds along those paths, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by the promise of a green energy panacea.

Senators will soon consider a resolution to pare back an Environmental Protection Agency plan to regulate greenhouse gases – a plan that would raise energy costs.

On June 10, the U.S. Senate will consider a “resolution of disapproval” regarding a 2009 ruling made by the EPA in late 2009 claiming six greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. This makes these gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride — subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

“The EPA’s endangerment finding endangers our economy and our liberty,” said Deneen Borelli, full-time fellow with the Project 21 black leadership network. “The EPA’s effort to regulate greenhouse gases will affect virtually every aspect of our economy and our lives. In expert opinion, this will result in higher energy costs and job losses while having — by their own admission — virtually no effect on cooling global climate.”

Senate Joint Resolution 26, introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), would use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the administrative ruling. This would allow elected representatives to deliberate and pass their own regulations as Congress sees fit.

“I don’t want an unelected bureaucrat imposing rules and regulations on businesses that are essentially a tax on energy and will be passed along to consumers — many of whom are just getting by as it is,” said Tom Borelli, director of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“Opposition to the cap-and-trade bill that was jammed through the House of Representatives is one of the key positions of the tea parties, and this endangerment finding is cap-and-trade by other means,” noted Deneen Borelli. “Americans are already skeptical enough of lawmakers these days. Watching them pass up an opportunity to do what they were sent to Washington for will restore no lost faith in the government.”

“This resolution is a major indicator of where our republic is headed. Senators will determine if they are going to cede their authority as an elected representative of the people to largely unaccountable bureaucrats,” added Tom Borelli. “While the White House is eager for the EPA to seize regulatory authority, rank-and-file Americans such as those found in the tea party movement are troubled and will be watching to see who will be for and who will be against this massive federal power grab.”

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-profit, free-market think-tank established in 1982 and funded primarily by the gifts of over 100,000 recent individual contributors. Less than one percent of funding is received from corporations.